Oh this book.
I loved this book.

Well of course I did. I’m Hilary McKay’s biggest fan, and was writing about her here recently, coincidentally: I had decided that her Saffy’s Angel is the best book to give a convalescent – read all about it here, and other people’s suggestions here.

The Skylark War is her newest book, just out, and it is astonishing.

I believe it is meant for Young Adults, but (as with the Casson Family books) far too good to be confined to them. It is a book for everyone. It is a family story from the beginning of the 20th century, moving into the First World War (the 100th anniversary of the end of the war is coming shortly, and presumably publication is matched to that.)

It is complicated, and funny, and sad, and it sticks in your mind after you’ve finished it. It combines everything: childhood games, strange families, important friendships, hideous schools. Then: young men in the trenches, women at home, life carrying on, the small things that mattered still even in wartime, and the big things that you know are going to come. And Clarry trying to get herself an education.

It is beautifully done, and must have been an incredibly hard tightrope to walk for the writer, because you can’t pretend there won’t be death and destruction, and that surely some of the characters are not going to have good endings. And the book is not horrible, but it is not at all soft-centred. There is nothing harsh, but it’s all there if you look, in McKay’s lovely relaxed writing.

Consider this. Clarry and her new friend Violet have been discussing writing to soldiers – Violet is looking for romance. She knows Clarry writes to a young man, her cousin, and Clarry says they aren’t love letters. A while later Violet asks to see a picture of Rupert.
‘Coo, lovely,’ said Violet. ‘Why’s he not in uniform?’
‘It was before. In Cornwall.’
‘Who’s he looking at?'
‘Me’
‘Well!’ said Violet. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t write him…. Oh never mind!’



And that’s what I call great writing, along with Violet saying ‘I know I shouldn’t say it, but I quite like this war. There’s more to do.’

And Clarry thinking of another friend:
He shouldn’t have gone. He needn’t have. What use would Simon be with a gun? He used to walk round ants, he was so kind. It isn’t fair. Mrs Morgan says if anything happens to him, it’s for the best. She says life isn’t easy for boys like him. I’m never speaking to her again.
I could keep going with quotes, but really I just urge you to read this book. I have read many novels and other books about WW1, all the standards and all the classics, and this is one of the very best that I have ever read, along with Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (which is a work of genius, too, but is a lot longer and not nearly so easy to read).

And actually, I would rather read this again than any of the books on the Booker Prize shortlist.

And I will, and it will make me cry again. The words:
‘My love to our skylarks. All three.’
‘Of course’
Will set me off. Again. Along with the spare key to the cricket pavilion on a leather bootlace.

But Skylark is also funny and charming, and just a delight beyond all imagining.

The Imperial War Museum has an extraordinary collection called ‘Faces of the First World War’: photographs of soldiers. It is an affecting and melancholy experience to look at it, but it is still well worth doing. This is a Lieutentant AR Baker of the Suffolk Regiment:




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Of course Hilary McKay does great clothes in the book – she is this blog’s ideal reader, as well as one of our pantheon of favourite writers. So I looked hard for the right pictures…

Top picture from the NYPL shows juvenile fashions from 1912. I wanted to find something nice for Clarry, who did not have much luck with clothes till she took matters into her own hands:
Miss Vane made a brand-new dress in a hideous green-and-mustard tartan…

Miss Vane unearthed a length of tightly woven blue-striped cloth that she had put away for curtains, and made Clarry a brand-new dress…
‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t last you for years.'
Clarry rather feared this too.


Small picture from same source shows dresses for ‘the betwixt and between girl’ – an early idea of teenagers.

I couldn’t find a velvet beret picture that I considered good enough for Clarry, but I loved those three young women in their nice hats – many of the other hat images I found were of rather older, stately women. This picture was much the best, I like to think of them as Clarry, Violet and Vanessa. Also from NYPL.

Loved it! Gentle, absorbing, enjoyable and worthwhile reading. This book will teach our younger generation for some time to come

A lovely lovely read. Hilary McKay has chosen the characters just right. The relationships are varied which makes the book more interesting. At times very sad but in the main a great book to read on holiday.

Covering the lives of Clarry, Peter and their cousin Rupert, this story unfolds between humdrum life at home and glorious childhood holidays set in Cormwall. Cornwall makes up for, in part, the fact that Peter and Clarry’s mother died in childbirth. Stricken by grief their father had no idea how to be a father, so mainly, left them alone.
The story follows their lives as they grow up and hurtle towards WW1. There are twists and turns along the way and there are a couple of places, where I admit to moist eyes!
I didn’t realise I was reading a children’s author at first and that is testament to this novel. I happily read it as an adult and enjoyed its feel good nature.

Skylarks’ War is one of my favourite books of the year and possibly the best that Hilary McKay has written, and I loved the Casson family stories.

It is a wonderful historical children’s story about family and friends growing up in the early 20th century and the effect of World War I on their lives. Hilary McKay has captured perfectly the feeling of the times. The way the characters talk and their behaviour and attitudes feel completely authentic. She writes about real people and the times they lived in and does not give her characters the attitudes and behaviours of modern young people. (One reviewer called it ‘an old-fashioned story’ but I disagree. This is what life was actually like – I’m old enough to have some experience of how life has changed in the last 60 years alone!)

For parents and teachers who want children to get a small understanding of life during the First World War you will find no better ‘children’s‘ book. I use inverted commas because like author Andrew Norriss, Hilary McKay writes stories that are enjoyed equally by children and adults – parents, teachers and librarians. You will not find emotional manipulation here. She does not tell us that ‘war is bad’ as other popular books set at this time do (we know that already thank you and don’t need an author to tell us the obvious), instead we live with these characters and see how they cope, suffer, love, grow and get on with life, as people did and do. There is tragedy and sadness, but also humour and kindness, honesty, and love which win through and last for a lifetime. Life is hard. It is how we grow through difficulties, and find and show love that is real in this world and that is why I think is such a special book.

There are excellent notes at the end of the book and a bibliography referencing the many sources that the author used to develop that events and lives.

#TheSkylarksWar

During the time when middle & upper class dad's rarely had time for their children.
The book is set in Oxford.
Peter and Clarry are used to living with having very little contact with dad. In the Summer they go to stay with their Grandparents and cousin in Cornwall. During this time the children build a strong relationship with their cousin Rupert.
Through the book there a number of main characters who help mould Clarry n Peter. Childhood friendship that grow with them.
The book covers the 1st World War; trench warfare with young volunteers, females fighting for the right to an education, friendships and Invisible bonds.
I really enjoyed this book and I feel it would suit an older child as well as adult readers.

The book is set in and around the time of World War 1. The main characters are children Clarry and Peter, their mother died when they were young and their father didn't have much interest in them. Every summer he shipped them off to grandparents in Cornwall, this was the highlight of the year for the two children. I would have loved this book as a child and would recommend it for children from about 10 years old.

The Skylarks' War feels like an instant classic. It brims with emotion and personality, and conveys enough of the horrors of war without too much graphic detail, so it can be appreciated on several levels by children and adults alike. I suspect this is a book I will be selling for many years. Wonderful!

I loved this book. The writing flowed, the characters became my friends, I laughed with them and I cried with them. Set during the early twentieth century the story revolves around three cousins and their friends, siblings Peter and Clarry and cousin Rupert. What begins as a gentle story soon gathers pace as bullying, depression, lost chances, sexism and The Great War are introduced.
“It was a war where absolutely nothing makes sense”
With strong themes running throughout, especially the changing role of women and the horrors and futility of war, this is a story which I shall remember forever.
I was reminded of The Railway Children with this novel and I would love to see it transferred to film so that a wider audience will have pleasure from it.

The Skylarks' War is an old-fashioned tale, written in distinctive, almost idiosyncratic prose. It is a coming-of-age story in the truest sense of the word, in that it follows an extended family of characters for years, from childhood to early adulthood, like Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle or Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks.  Cheerful, bright Clarry is at its heart. There's also bad-tempered, slowly-flourishing brother Peter; grammar school girl turned nurse Vanessa; ungainly, loyal Simon, and nosy Miss Vane. And then there's Clarry's favourite, her charismatic, reckless cousin Rupert ("Having endured the desertion of his parents, a Cornish winter when a gale was so strong it blew him off the cliff, a Christmas of scarlet fever and innumerable years in compulsory education, he was assumed to be indestructible and allowed to do what he liked").

As historical fiction, The Skylarks' War straddles a complex era in which the Edwardian period gave way to the First World War, and in which the young were faced with changes and horrors once unimaginable to their firmly Victorian parents and grandparents. It grapples with ideas of education, ambition, patriotism, trauma, and vibrant hope. I particularly liked the intense exploration of family dynamics and the use of letters. There are a few inelegant touches - an instance of (a heavily implied) 'bury your gays' trope, some Irish stereotypes - but on the whole it is a vivid, detailed, unputdownable novel. The book's most astonishing achievement is its multifariousness: it has moments of appalling devastation and breathless high spirits, no-nonsense practicality and emerging aspiration, frosty distance and, finally, joyful warmth.

Hilary McKay's The Skylarks' War is multi-faceted and gut-wrenching, vivid and warm. A historical novel reminiscent of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, Michael Morpurgo's War Horse and Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers. 

A longer version of this review will appear on my blog closer to publication.

This is a wonderfully written story, and at the beginning I was certain it was going to be a 5 star read for me - it slips so deliciously into these children's lives & felt immediately like a classic, like the Railway Children or Noel Streatfield. I loved Clarry, her battles with her dreadful father, her relationship with her brother, and her escapes to her grandparents' house in Cornwall. The descriptions are beautiful, and you really feel yourself there & a part of the era as it moves into the First World War. The constraints upon Clarry as a girl, in comparison to her brother's life, are sad to read but, of course, all too realistic for the time. I devoured the first half or so of the book and absolutely loved it. It was only as the characters got older that I felt the story dragged a little. Maybe it should have been two books, one around Clarry's childhood, the other about the war & as she grew older? It felt like a shift away from being a children's story into something much darker, for obvious reasons, and less enjoyable. I wouldn't want to put anyone off reading, because it's still a really fabulous book. But I just felt that the last part didn't really live up to the beginning.

An excellent children’s book that can also be enjoyed by adults.
The story centres on Clarry and Peter, starting in 1902, when we find the children living with a cold, distant father after the death of their mother when Clarry was a few days old.
The characters are brought to life against a background of school life, growing friendships and ultimately, the First Workd War.
I warmed to them all and loved following their stories.
My thanks to Netgalley for this copy.

This is a truly magnificent book. It doesn’t matter if you are a child or an adult it will enchant you all.
It opens at the beginning of the twentieth century and tells the story of Clarry and Peter and their lives from childhood to adulthood.
The first part describes the different aspects of their lives as children. Their mother died whilst giving birth to Clarryand their father it would appear had no interest in his children. Their only joy was the summer holidays spent in Cornwall with their grandparents and their cousin Rupert.
The second half of the book deals with life during the First World War and describes how it effected all members is society both young and old.
This book deals with many aspects of social history of that period. Women’s place in society as well as children’s.
It will give children an insight to the horrors of that conflict and why we still remember the fallen of that war today.
Brilliant book for both young and old.

Clarry always felt responsible for the fact her mother died after giving birth to her so accepts that her father is always too busy to pay attention to herself and her brother, Peter. The highlight of her year is visiting her grandmother’s cottage in Cornwall where she gets to have adventures with her cousin, Rupert. However this idyllic time is drawing to an end as the war looms and everyone is forced to grow up too quickly. Hilary McKay works her magic bringing us into the midst of Clarry’s life and giving us a taste of the early 20th century.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

A beautifully crafted novel set in the years before the First World War and then during the War. This novel revolves around Clarry and her older brother Peter who live for their summers spent in Cornwall with their grandparents and especially their cousin Rupert who gives them the love and affection that their widowed father fails to give them. Hence the title Skylarks War which is based on what their Grandfather thinks of the return of the young people each summer.. Their lives evolve around various events like when Peter in an effort to prevent his dispatch to boarding school manages to break his leg. Rupert is very much the centre of their lives as well as Mrs Murphy the cleaner, Mr King the rag and bone man and eccentric Miss Kane, and Simon, a boarder at Peter’s school and his sister Vanessa. How these unloved siblings make their way through life and survive is central to the novel and the author makes the period come alive through her evocative descriptions. A great read about family, love and loyalty.

I am so impressed with the way Hilary McKay has taken a slice of English life in the First World War, told from the perspective of a naive young girl, and imbued it with a mixture of innocence, discovery and pathos. She mirrors her readership, whose understanding of the war and the home front may well be limited, and takes them on a journey of gradual awareness through the various stages of the war but with a touching sense of innocence, particularly in the central character. I love the way she creates that timeless quality of the great children's classics, even though the novel is based firmly in the early war years, and weaves a saga of children growing up and surviving in rapidly changing circumstances. We follow the young people into maturity and care deeply about their anxieties, their upsets and their triumphs, however far-fetched, and hope for a reassuringly happy ending. A charming and at times moving book, destined to be a classic in its own right, and hopefully creating its own nostalgia through generations of reading in the future.

Being a resident of Cornwall, I was drawn to this book because it's partly set in this beautiful county, as well as Plymouth and France. I haven't read any of Hilary McKay's other books (I'm ashamed to say), not even 'Saffy's Angel', for which she won the 2002 Whitbread Children's Book of the Year. But I've heard wonderful things about her stories, so was itching to read this one.

The story follows brother and sister Clarry and Peter, growing up in Plymouth in the early 1900s with their father (their mother died after giving birth to Clarry), and holidaying in Cornwall during the summer holidays with their grandparents and their cousin Rupert. Their father doesn't have a good bond with them, always preferring to sit on his own in his study rather than talking to his children, so Clarry and Peter always desperately look forward to their summer jaunts by the sea. When not in Cornwall during the holidays, Rupert goes to boarding school, and Peter is told he must go too. He is adamantly against this, and takes drastic measures to make sure he doesn't have to go. However, in the long run his plan doesn't have much effect and off he goes. He does make a very close friend while there, Simon, who is also very much in awe of Rupert. While the boys are at boarding school, Clarry battles against the sexism of the time whereby young ladies weren't meant to have ambitions, or want to learn anything other than needlecraft and cookery. She's a strong-willed and independent girl, and stands up to her father to make sure she gets her way. However the First World War is soon upon them, and the rosy dreams of endless summer holidays and laughter is brought to an abrupt end. How will the war affect the children's friendship? And will they all survive it?

McKay is very clever at how she explains the horror and pain of the war in a realistic but not over-dramatic way. After all, her audience is young children aged 9-12, so they need to be told the facts, but not in a way to give them nightmares. It was educational concerning how females were treated at the time, and also about how people rallied around doing their bit for the war effort. I was slightly disappointed that there weren't more descriptive scenes about their surroundings in either Cornwall or Plymouth, the text was more conversational. However, saying that, I enjoyed the book, I loved all the characters (Simon's sister Vanessa was slightly over-enthusiastic for me!), and it was a moving and fast-paced story.

The Skylarks' War follows our main character Clarry and her family during the war, it has a sweet narrative as we follow these children making the most of a bad situation and still having positive childhood experiences. As this is a children's novel, it was quick and fairly simple read, however, for the most part it appeared to be a historically accurate telling of people's life during the war. I enjoyed the character of Clarry as the story progressed and there weren't any side characters that I had serious problems with. Overall, it was a sweet children's book covering a serious historical event that I would recommend to younger readers.

Occasionally, very occasionally, you read a book that slips so perfectly into the canon that it seems as if it was always there. That you read it as a child, reread it over and over, until it forms part of you along with Anne Shirley and Jo March, the Fossil sisters, Jo Bettany and Veronica Weston and Nicola Marlowe... the Skylarks' War is such a book.
Clarry's birth coincides with her mother's death, and her father, who only misses out on tyranny through indifference, thinks it's a shame she didn't depart along with the wife he's too selfish to mourn. Somehow Clarry holds on and, along with her brother Peter, is half-brought up by a series of well meaning neighbours, housekeepers and, in the summer, they head to Cornwall and her grandparents and adored older cousin, Rupert. Peter at least is given an education - although the threat of boarding school hangs heavily over him - but Clarry is sent instead to two elderly women who barely teach her to sew let alone think. Not that she lets that stop her...
There is so much packed into the book it feels like it should be a whole series. We follow Clarry from birth to womanhood and yet no part of her life feels hurried through. Like any book that starts in the early 1900s there's a sense of inevitability, a knowledge of the upheaval about to hit the children as they reach adulthood and yet when the war comes it's as shocking to us as it is for them.
This is a wonderful book filled with unforgettable characters, the kind of characters that seem to exist outside the pages. Clarry and Peter, Rupert, their friends Vanessa and Simon, Miss Vane and Mrs Morgan and Mr King. The Streatfield comparisons are deserved, more Vicarage Family Streatfield (my favourite kind) than Ballet Shoes although the Fossils would have found a kindred spirit in Clarry.
The Skylarks' War deserves to win every award going but more than that it deserves to be read, to be on every bookshelf of every bookworm throughout the land. It's not a modern day classic. It's a classic.

This was a wonderful read. The characters really came alive for me and I felt that I was living with them. Many issues were covered in the book but at no point did the feel shoe-horned in - they were all natural parts of the story. I cried more than once while reading the book and learned several new things about a topic that I've been researching into for the past 4 years.
The light hearted touch remided me a lot of Eve Ibbotson's work - books that you could quite happily give to a good reader under 10 but one that is complex enough for adults to read - I really think that it is a book that would work really well at intergenerational book groups.
Absolutely wonderful - will definitely be in my top books of the year.